Wheels Around Glasgow

I came across this little book in Partick Library yesterday, Wheels Around Glasgow, about Glasgow's 'heyday' of smoke, smog, and slums.

Have things changed? I found myself asking.

Well, the smoke is more undetectable, but it's still there with the massive increase in private transport since those days. When I see old photos of car-less streets I smile. Nowadays, our streets are full of cars, parked and moving, and little else. Indeed, as I walked down to Partick from Byres Road I zig-zagged through the streets of Dowanhill, and came across a street that exemplified this car-scenario. It was the western end of Fordyce Street, a dark and narrow corridor replete with more cars than you can shake a clamp at. A desperate situation in terms of town planning and healthy living.

I always find myself comparing this dark hole of a situation to the airy lightness of a carless society, where there is no pollution, no noisy engines, no roads per se but paths and waterways, where the wheels around 'the city' are emphatically powered by one's own steam, and if you have no steam, then tough, you'll have to take a backy. Or perhaps inhale the fundamental truth, that if you cannot get somewhere by your own energy, then you cannot get there. To concoct some conveyance device that not only deprives you of your own vital energies (and the synergies that erupt from these) but which literally poisons the air you breathe and kills the distance between here and there, is not only a form of cheating and self-delusion, but it is also a kind of madness that disembodies the human from itself. Cars may well be the most convenient of transportations, but there are also, existentially speaking, the most lethal.

Now dismembered and disembodied from space itself, the human becomes something of a construct, a package that can be decorated, -bubble-wrapped, and flat-packed. Great for capitalism and commerce, but not so good for health and wholeness, and the planet as a whole.

I then find myself asking if things have really 'improved' since the slums, and the smogs of old Glasgow.... 

A Burlingham-bodied Leyland Royal Tiger Coach outside the offices of Lowland Motorways in Glasgow, bound for 'The Three Lochs' (Lomond, Long, and Gareloch). It certainly beats the 62 to Faifley!